A Comprehensible Universe:The Blessing from God that Makes Science Possible

By Bob Kaita

Modern science has been extraordinary in its ability to explain much of what we observe around us. The inventions it has inspired would have been considered miraculous just a short time ago. At the same time, many who are the beneficiaries of science fail to realize that its success depends on a belief that our universe is comprehensible. Science must assume the existence of immutable laws of nature, but it cannot tell us whence they came. To the believer, a comprehensible universe is a blessing from God that comes from the covenant promises in the earliest chapters of Genesis. This essay explains how this truth has served modern science well from its beginnings to the present day.

It is privilege and pleasure to dedicate these words to Walt and Ginny Hearn. In the years I’ve known him, I’ve appreciated Walt’s unique and wonderful service as a scientist, writer, and most of all, a dedicated servant of Christ.

I am a physicist at the Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University, where we do nuclear fusion energy research. Fusion is a way of getting energy by making atoms stick together. They are in a gas that has to be at many millions of degrees. Regular materials can’t be used at such high temperatures. Instead we use very big magnets to create magnetic “bottles.”

The magnetic bottle is called a “tokamak.” This is a Russian acronym for a toroidal magnetic chamber. To give you an idea of how big such a machine is, picture a giant doughnut-shaped chamber that is big enough for me to stand in. The goal is fusion is to make what happens inside the sun inside the machine. It’s hard, but if we’re successful, we’ll have a new clean source of energy.

What makes any of this possible is the topic of this essay. I have entitled it, “A Comprehensible Universe: The Blessing from God that Makes Science Possible.” Perhaps another, more provocative way of expressing this how the “boring” Biblical account of how the universe was created ultimately makes it understandable. What to do I mean by this? Let’s begin at the beginning, as it were, with two creation accounts. We’re all familiar with the beginning of Genesis. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” No drama here. God just did it. Contrast this with the creation story from my Japanese ancestors. Two divine beings churned the sea with a jewel-bedecked spear. Japan was created from the drops of salty water that fell from the spear.

The Japanese story is certainly more colorful. Scholars might still study the story for the insight it provides into the Japanese psyche. It would be hard to find someone, however, who would try to figure out how much seawater would contain enough salt to create the islands in the Japanese archipelago, and then calculate how large the spear had to be!

Consider now the Genesis account. Reading on in the first chapter, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. … God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day,’ and the darkness God called ‘night.’ And there was evening and there was morning – the first day.” It is a sober, “boring” account, and yet one that has motivated centuries of study.

Ironically, the very “boring” nature of the Genesis account begs for it to be taken seriously. Creation accounts that are motivated by the human desire to explain our existence are necessary more colorful. This is because they are exercises in our imagination. Genesis is different. It doesn’t provide a colorful explanation of how everything came about. Rather, it simply tells us that God was responsible. This is all we need to know, and that’s what God inspired the writer of Genesis to record.

What does this have to do with science? The word itself derives from the Latin word for “know.” What God tells us we need to know at the beginning of His Word sets the stage for what else we can know about the universe He created. Let’s look at today’s text. In Genesis 8:22, we read, “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.”

There are two ways to look at the last two words in the passage, “never cease.” One is to consider their usage in an expression of boredom like, “Will this talk never cease?” The other is to consider the boring a blessing, and this is where science comes in. What we have in Genesis 8:22 is a poetic expression of the nature of the laws of nature, as it were. When we put seeds, we expect plants to grow. When we drop something, we expect it to fall.

Of course, this depends on the conditions to be the same each time we do a particular “experiment.” We can’t have the same expectations if we forget to water the plants or ignore wind and solar conditions in our planting. If we account for such variables, we can expect the same results, or can we? Without the faith that we’ll get the same results under the same conditions, we can't do science. Science itself can’t provide this faith. It must come from outside of science. For those of us who believe in God, it comes from the promise He gave us in passages like the one we just read.

The “boring” inherent in the promise that season will follow season thus makes the pursuit of science a rational thing to do. The problem is that not many people, scientists and nonscientists alike, think about this. Let’s take a simple example. We see a lamp and the bulb doesn’t light. There are a couple of possibilities for why this failure occurred. First, the bulb might be burned out. Alternatively, there might be a tripped circuit breaker or a power failure.

I’m a physicist, so I like equations. Let me use one that’s called “Ohm’s Law,” which is familiar to many of you. It says that the voltage or V equals the current or I times the resistance or R. In other words, V = I x R. For the bulb to light up, you need current to flow through it. From Ohm’s Law, I = V/R. A power failure means no “V” and there’s no current. A burnt out bulb means “R” is infinite and there’s no current.

Physicists, like everybody else, will check the their circuit breakers and their bulbs. No physicist I know of, though, would question the validity of V = I x R. “Faith” is needed to believe that the “laws of nature” – or the math beloved by physicists used to formulate them – will not change from one day to the next. We can freely admit to where our faith comes from, as we praise God for our “boring” universe!

I am neither the first nor anywhere near the most prominent of physicists to believe this. Isaac Newton needs no introduction. Many people have heard the story of how he figured out his theory of gravity by watching an apple fall. This may not be true, but his “Law of Universal Gravitation” is still valid today. What many people don’t know is what Newton thought about the idea of gravity itself. He said, “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.”

Moving forward a couple of centuries, we come to James Maxwell. All physicists know his four famous equations that describe electricity and magnetism. He also believed in God. He said, “I think that men of science as well as other men need to learn from Christ, and I think that Christians whose minds are scientific are bound to study science that this view of the glory of God may be as extensive as their being is capable of."

It’s hard to imagine modern life without lasers. One of its inventors, Charles Townes said the following about his belief in God. “Faith is necessary for the scientist even to get started, and deep faith is necessary for him to carry out his tougher tasks. Why? Because he must have confidence that there is order in the universe and that the human mind - in fact his own mind - has a good chance of understanding this order.”

The order that Townes mentions enables the predictability that is the hallmark of science. The boring is hardly a blessing if it’s the result of predictability in a story from our imagination. The boring, in contrast, is in fact a blessing if it arises from the predictability promised by God in the created universe. Indeed, it’s a necessity for us if we’re to be creative beings made in God’s image. Painters are confident that the same mixture of paints gives rise to the same color palette. Musicians are confident that the same keys give rise to the same notes. The fact that all of this is boring is as it should be, a covenant promise by God who is creator and sustainer. The blessing that comes from this promise is that it frees us from worrying about our paints, instruments, or anything else we need to be creative.

The covenant promise in Genesis of regularity in God’s universe is needed to set the stage for the ultimate covenant promise. It is salvation through Jesus Christ. A universe with immutable laws of nature allows us to appreciate the most significant event in human history. It is Christ’s resurrection, which is extraordinary precisely because it’s impossible according to the science that God makes possible. It is why the story of the crucifixion can and must be taken seriously. The writer of Hebrews tells us, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” The laws of God’s universe that make it comprehensible are immutable. So it is with God’s love for us, shown through God's only son, who gave himself so that we might have life eternal.

Let me conclude that by saying that I’m clearly not the only scientist who feels this way. Within my specialty, there’s even a group called the “Plasma Science Christian Fellowship.” We gather for prayer and fellowship at annual meetings of the American Physical Society, the largest organization of physicists in the US. More broadly, the American Scientific Affiliation as a national organization of Christians in science has been a personal encouragement to me. Thank you, Walt and Ginny for your dedication to the ASA and the service of Christ.​

Robert (Bob) Kaita is head of boundary physics operations for the National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U) and deputy head of research operations.

Bob is also a co-principal investigator of the Lithium Tokamak Experiment (LTX). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a recipient of the Kaul Foundation Prize for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research. He has supervised the research of many students in the PPPL Program in Plasma Physics in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University.